The Dandelion

By Terry Guilford

After discovering her husband of 26 years is having an affair, the narrator of the story falls into what she describes as a deep, dark well of fear and despair. The thought of possibly losing everything in her life, including her sanity, encourages her to seek the help and support of a psychologist.
With the psychologists gentle and compassionate guidance, the narrator (who remains unnamed) travels through a range of frightening emotions encompassing rage, revenge, anger, frustration, overwhelm, pessimism and boredom.

Eventually she finds a glimpse of hope when she learns that she has the ability to alter her thoughts and feelings through practice, and understanding that her beliefs are just thoughts she keeps thinking. It enables her to begin making positive and courageous decisions for herself and for her future and she discovers a wonderful would be beyond her middle-class comfort and role as a wife and mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452521190

Terry Guilford

Terry Guilford, who has had various occupations throughout her life, is a mother, grandmother and a retired psychologist. She lives and works in a small, seaside town in Victoria, Australia. Her aim through her practice and through her book is to teach people that they have the power to be, do and have whatever is important to them. Her interest on the power of thought and her studies of the work of Edgar Cayce, Louise L. Hay and Esther Hicks has enabled her, through her work as a psychologist, to encourage more people to become aware of their purpose in life. Her novel The Dandelion is her first book and one that she hopes will inspire, entertain and give others insight, clarity, and the courage to change and improve the quality of their lives.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Deep, Dark Well

"My dearest, darling Michael,

I am leaving you and you know why. I love you and I am leaving you today.

It feels so good to be able to say that, so exhilarating and so powerful. I am leaving you. I feel like jumping up and down and punching the air and screaming, yes, I am doing it! I am leaving you. After 30 years together and two beautiful children, I am going. There is no longer any reason for me to stay. I waited ten long, painful months for you to leave me until I couldn’t stand the powerless, helpless feeling anymore. Now I am leaving you. I am leaving you today, December 12.

I haven’t always felt this good. Ten months ago, I felt isolated and paralyzed with fear. I don’t feel that way now, but rather the reverse. I feel outrageously happy and excited. I feel fabulous.

In two minutes, I will phone you at your office to make sure you are back from Perth. I will ask you to open the email and attachment from me as soon as you are free. I will hang up and then I will press send. Please read the attachment, my letter to you, Mike. It will help you understand what I have just done to you.

In half an hour you will receive by courier a small envelope with a post office box key and a storage unit key in it. You will need to sign for it.

Then you will understand.

Why didn’t you tell me? I imagine you asking. I am telling you now, I reply. Please read this. Why have you written to me? I hear you ask. I have written you this letter because I just had to write it. I want and need to explain. For thirty years, you were my lover, husband and best friend. You were the person I could tell anything and everything to. When I had an interesting day, I always thought, I must tell my dearest darling – my Mike. I still do, because habits can be hard to break. I still want to tell you everything that is interesting or important to me, but I intend to let that fade with time.

For now, I am writing to tell you what has happened to me over the past ten months before your unseeing eyes, condensed from some recordings with my therapist and the journal she encouraged me to write. You’ve been seeing a therapist? Since when? I hear you ask. Yes, I have. Seeing a therapist is one of the many things I have been doing over the past ten months to help me come to this decision.

Why didn’t you just tell me, or deliver this letter yourself? I hear you ask. I couldn’t give it to you in person, my darling, because I’m a coward. I don’t want to see you. I am afraid that if I see your beloved face, I might change my mind. The last time I saw you, four days ago, you hugged me, picked up your suitcase, smiled and kissed me goodbye. That was the last and best image I have of you and I don’t want to spoil it. I might have had some satisfaction from seeing the expression on your face today if I spoke to you or gave you a letter, but I simply couldn’t risk it and it wouldn’t be worth it.

Believe me, I thought about it. I thought about it a lot. Over the past month, I have imagined a variety of scenarios. You might be shocked, horrified and disbelieving. You might cry. You might beg me to stay, which would be very satisfying. You might be relieved, delighted or even euphoric, which would not. Either way, I don’t want to remember you that way. I want my last image of you to be one in which you smile and kiss me goodbye.

Why did you send the keys to my office? I hear you ask. I needed to be sure you would receive them. That woman works in your office and the envelope may have become ‘mislaid’ so I am making sure you receive it by arranging for you to sign for it. Besides, the office is the only place I can send it – don’t ask. Just read the letter. By doing it this way, I can leave you – no discussion, no negotiation, no drama - just a done deal.

I have also written this letter because I believe there will be tough times ahead for you, sweetheart, and the strategies I learned from my therapist may help you the way they helped me.

I have loved you since I was eighteen years old. I still love you and I am forty-eight. You are, and probably always will be, the love of my life, and I am finally at a place where I can honestly say that I want you to be happy, simply because if you are happy, maybe you will leave me alone to be happy too.

I want you to know how I went from holding my breath every time you walked through the door, to breathing freely and easily, no matter where you were or what you were doing. I want you to know how I went from having my happiness depend on your every move, to discovering that my happiness depends entirely on my ability to focus on who I am and what I want.

How did you find out? I hear you ask. I saw you with another woman on Wednesday, February 8 – the day my life fell apart. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, two months after my Mum died, six days after our twenty-sixth wedding anniversary and three days after we had to have lovely old Molly put down.

I had been over to your parents’ house, just as I did every Wednesday morning, to check their medications and order their groceries.

I was cycling across the park to meet four of my friends for coffee at the Pavilion Café when I saw the two of you together in the Fitzroy Gardens. You were sitting under a tree about thirty meters away on a rug with a young, blonde woman. You were kissing her, holding her hands, smiling and talking. The two of you were totally engrossed in each other. I was watching lovers who knew each other well. I got off my bike for another look. It was definitely you; there was no doubt about it. To make sure, I phoned you. I saw you take out your phone, look at the screen for a second, touch it and toss it aside. The phone went dead at my end. You knew it was me and you tossed me aside. I stood still. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The betrayal I felt was overwhelming. Then, something unexpected happened. I started to tremble and wet my pants. And not just a little; I lost the lot. My bladder simply let go.

Warm urine ran down the inside of my sports pants, filling my shoes and forming a puddle on the ground around me. I couldn’t walk up to you. I couldn’t ask what you were doing or who that woman was. It would have been too humiliating. I couldn’t do anything but stand still, keep my balance by holding my bike and stare from a distance. People passing by looked at me and saw the puddle on the ground. One young man approached and asked if I was okay. I smiled weakly and waved him away. Yes, I was fine. I had only entered an alternate universe where nothing I believed made sense. I felt like I had fallen down a deep, dark well.

Now, however, I can look back and say that wetting my pants saved me. I am also grateful that only my bladder let go. It could have been much worse.

Over the years, I trusted you not to cheat because I loved you and believed in you. I believed in us. You still came home at night and you still made love to me often. I believed that we cared enough about each other to resist the temptation of becoming involved with anyone else. As far as I know, you were faithful until recently. If you weren’t, I don’t want to know.

I loved you. I still do; you are the man I have known and loved for thirty years. You are still so good in so many ways. I loved almost everything about you. I loved the sight, smell and sound of you. I adored having you near me. I loved who you were. I loved that because you loved me, you liked women in general, the same way that loving you made me respect what was good in all men. I loved our history and the possibilities for our future. I had been putting money away for a holiday on a luxury Great Barrier Reef island for your fiftieth birthday and I almost had enough saved before seeing you in the park. At the time, the idea of surprising you with a week on a tropical island was exciting. Now it just seems sad.

So I stood there in my wet pants, sodden socks and squelching shoes. I turned my bike around and headed home where I sat in the shower, cried for ages and went to bed, exhausted. The phone rang and I ignored it. I heard voices on the answering machine. My friends at the coffee shop were waiting for me. They all chimed in cheerfully together, wanting to know where I was, asking if I had forgotten, and to call them back. They were friends you hardly knew. When the kids were small, we all met at playgroup. We were still friends simply because we had known each other for more than twenty years. If I met them now, we would probably have nothing in common. Out of habit, however, and perhaps because I worried about what they might say about me behind my back if I stopped going, I met with them every second month at a café for gossip, trivial conversation, coffee and cake.

I lay in bed and listened to them telling me I was no fun and began to wonder who I could talk to about what had just happened. I knew with certainty it couldn’t be any of them. It couldn’t be any of my other friends either. I couldn’t rely on any of them to understand, or to keep quiet about it. I missed Judy, my dearest and oldest friend. I could have told her and she would have understood, but she had been dead for two years, so there was nobody I could talk to about something that mattered so much.

Why didn’t you say anything? I hear you ask. In my imagination, over the past ten months, I have heard you ask this question repeatedly. Each time you asked, I had a different answer, because I didn’t know why I couldn’t ask you about what I had seen. I was frightened. Initially, I was numb, paralyzed with terror. Everything around me was the same, yet different. I felt panicked and powerless. I couldn’t think, let alone speak. All I could do was remember the way you shut down my phone call without the slightest interest in why I might be calling. Somehow that felt like a greater betrayal than kissing another woman in the park.

All I could do was ask myself questions that I was too afraid to answer.

What if I say nothing? What if I turn a blind eye? What if I just pretend that I don’t know? What if I ask you? What if I confront you? What if you deny it and say it wasn’t you and I was mistaken? What if you say you can’t believe I could think you would do such a thing? What if you accuse me of being paranoid or suspicious?

What if you admit it? What if you say you love her? What if you say it’s been going on for weeks, months or years? What if you say you want to leave me? What if you want a divorce? What if you say she is pregnant? What if you want to marry her?

What if I never see you again?

What if you come home and tell me you are leaving? What if you come home and tell me you want me to leave and tell me you never want to see me again and kick me out the front door? What if I have nowhere to go? What if you move that woman into my home once I am gone and she moves into my kitchen, into my bedroom, into my bed, into my life?

What if you convince the courts that the house is yours? What if I come home and the doors are locked and my suitcase is on the porch and that woman is inside, laughing at me, or pointing at me through the curtains? Or calling the police?

What if I have a nervous breakdown and lose my job and can’t get another job because I am too old? What if I have no money and nowhere to live?

What if our kids like, no, love that woman more than me and she turns them against me and I never see them again? What if you have more children and you all spend happy Christmases together? What if I spend every Christmas alone? What if I am always alone, living in a caravan, on government assistance? What if I turn into a homeless, old bag lady who dies, cold and alone in the street and they find me days later, frozen to death?

What if, what if, what if.

Was I being melodramatic? Yes, when I think about it now, I definitely was, but at the time, I couldn’t stop asking myself those terrifying, unanswerable questions. They invaded my mind like a swarm of wasps, one after the other. I didn’t have answers for any of those questions. They made me frantic and unable to think rationally. Each ‘what-if’ was worse than the last. I could hardly breathe.

I couldn’t stay still. I paced around the house, crying and babbling to myself like a mad woman until I was exhausted and had to lie down. Then I got up, paced and babbled until I was exhausted again and lay down. Eventually I wore myself out and curled up under the covers.

I don’t suppose you remember, but I’ll ask anyway. Do you remember the day you came home and I had the ‘flu’? I was all hot and congested. I wouldn’t let you look at me because you would have seen that I had been crying and wasn’t really sick at all. That was the day I found out you were seeing another woman. That was the day I knew that my marriage, as I understood it, was over. When you brought me a cup of tea, I couldn’t meet your eyes. I didn’t notice then that you had trouble meeting mine. That came later.

You slept in another room that night so you wouldn’t disturb me, or catch ‘the bug’. I lay awake for hours. I could hear you snoring, so close and yet so far. I wanted to run to you and have you wrap me in your arms. I wanted to look at your beloved, sleeping face. But I didn’t dare. I couldn’t move from the bed so I reached across to your side. It was cold and empty. I put my face in your pillow to smell you, but I could smell perfume as well, and it wasn’t mine. I rolled back onto my side of the bed and cried, trying to stifle the sound with a corner of the blanket in my mouth. Being in our bed without you was the loneliest place on the planet. If anybody had offered me a chance to die, I might have taken it. I eventually fell asleep. I dozed fitfully, my dreams were disturbing and I woke in a sweat. You left for work without waking me.

I stayed home that day and wandered aimlessly through the house, still crying and talking to myself and asking questions. What if you come home today to tell me you are leaving me? I spent the day pacing the house. I couldn’t eat. I stopped wanting to think, because each thought became a frightening question, followed by another question that I couldn’t answer. The faster I thought, the faster the questions came up and they went around and around in my head and wouldn’t stop.

That night, when you came home from work, I was still in bed and you brought me a cup of tea. By then, I really did look unwell. There was a concerned expression on your face, which I interpreted, with pitiful hopefulness, as love. It gave me the chance to believe that perhaps you still loved me and that what I had seen the day before was temporary and unimportant.

But I didn’t believe it was. There seemed to be such intimacy between the two of you, such affection and enjoyment. Your summary dismissal of my call was so immediate, so automatic. I knew your relationship with that woman wasn’t a fling, but you looked at me that evening with something in your eyes that felt, to me, like love, and with that little ray of hope, I fell into a long, deep sleep. When I woke the next morning, I was certain I couldn’t say anything to you yet. I had to wait. I needed some answers to my questions first.

But why didn’t you say something? I hear you ask again. Why didn’t you? I reply. Oh, I know the answer to that one. Why would you? You were a married man who believed he was getting away with having an affair and you didn’t know I had seen you in the park.

Chapter 2

Twisting My Rings

The next morning I got up and went back to work. I had to. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know where else to go. I only knew I couldn’t stay at home alone anymore. If I did, I would go mad. The staff and the children at the childcare center behaved as they always had. Everything appeared normal, but I felt different. I felt bewildered and sick. I sat at the desk in my office and was desperate to feel normal again. Usually, I like to go and see the children, many of whom I have known almost since they were born. Our childcare center is a second home for most of them because their parents work full time, and as you know, I have always prided myself on knowing all their names and being able to find time to play with them.

That day, I stayed away from them. I stayed away from my staff. They took one look at me and stayed away from me as well. I sat in my office, staring at the papers on my desk. I couldn’t make sense of anything in front of me. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t think and I got nothing done.

As I walked along the corridor toward the staff room, a little girl called out to me. I stopped and squatted down beside her. She